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Compellent declares beginning of an era and offers dedupe

The industrial revolution is over

Compellent is to offer dynamic block deduplication, a move it puts down to the end of the manufacturing age and the dawn of the Facebook era.

CEO Phil Soran outlined the company's plans to channel partners at the C-Drive event in Minneapolis on Monday.

The pitch is that the world has transitioned from a manufacturing-focused to a service-focused and then to a digital-focused economy – a “data” economy. With everything becoming digital there is a flood of data: "It’s only taken four years for Facebook to have 400 million pages."

Compellent is developing its Storage Center product technology so that it can both scale up and out, and manage more of a customer's data life-cycle in an efficient manner. This is where dynamic block deduplication comes in. Compellent's data progression technology already tracks disk block activity and moves a block of data up and down storage tiers, from SSD through Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA drive tiers. Each block has meta data associated with it.

In theory that could be added to, for example, a hash tag identifying its content. Compellent hasn't said yet where in its drive hierachy the deduplication will be implemented. So far the only company that has announced primary data deduplication is Nimbus and its S-class, all-solid state product has only just been launched. It has no large-scale validation of its technology yet.

NetApp has its ASIS deduplication and suggests that this be used for less active primary data and nearline data.

Compellent also suggests it will bring a cloud storage tier to its customers somehow with the ability for them to access their data, termed fluid data in Compellent's marketing schtick, "regardless of location." ®